[split] Are Questions About God Important?

[Belacqua]

@Belacqua
It's not that you can't prove that it's bad to torture infants for fun, it's that the question is somewhat meaningless because the word 'bad' has been smuggled in - which is the whole problem.

Is it wrong to do X (whatever X is)?

Since no ought can be derived from an is, the terms bad/good and all moral language doesn't seem to refer to anything objective or concrete or measurable - it only refers to subjective feelings and intuitions.  It boils down to personal preferences.  You can see the influence of Hume, the logical positivists, and nihilism upon me lol

So, certainly, because of the way humans have evolved, the psychotic lack of empathy is seen as an illness, but it doesn't correspond to some delusion about the nature of reality in the way someone subject to irrational illusions and hallucinations does.  

I think we're close to the conversation we had earlier, about meaning and nihilism. As I recall, we agreed that meanings are created by people. I held that even though they are created things, they are still real.

I also think that subjective feelings and intuitions are real things that exist in the world. Human minds are real things. Some real things are not quantifiable. 

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It's just that a psychopath's brain doesn't work the same as everyone else's not that they are misperceiving reality. 

The rubber hits the road with the idea of human flourishing when there's a split between what is best for me as an individual and what is best for human flourishing, or anyone else in any quantity.  There's nothing irrational about choosing to do what is entirely selfish, nor can we say there's anything 'bad' as if morality was some external objective force.  The only concern would be whether or not the selfish action is truly in my own best interest given how society functions (and given whatever degree of personal empathy and conscience etc I have).

I don't see any ethical question that needs to invoke anything else other my own best interest or personal preference.  There's no need to obfuscate matters by trying to place ethics outside myself.

Well, some psychotics believe untrue things. They think the mailman is a monster or something. But I see what you're saying. 

Subjective things can be intersubjective to a very strong degree. And this makes them more than personal -- they are things that are held in common by a significant percentage of people. So ethics is not entirely inside oneself alone. 

You're right, of course, that there are major unsolvable issues about what is best for me as an individual vs. a more general view of human flourishing. We talked earlier about smoking, for example, and I was willing to accept that as a personal choice I can see the attraction. But that doesn't make ethical discussions worthless -- it only makes them difficult. And eventually unsolvable in any absolute sense. (Which is why humility is ethically good.) I just think we need to keep discussing and challenging ethical questions, despite the knowledge that we will never reach an end of it. (Which is true of most philosophical questions, I think.) 

Even Dante thought that we can't know all the answers.